Areas of Research

Education

Ph.D., Civil Engineering, Northwestern University, 1998

M.S., Civil Engineering, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, 1994

B.A., Geography, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, 1989

Biography

Dr. Andrew Graettinger’s interests include sustainability in the field of geotechnical engineering. Industrial byproduct utilization has the potential to increase recycling while at the same time diverting material typically landfilled. Understanding both the mechanical and environmental behavior of recycled materials in geotechnical engineering applications is key to promoting widespread adoption.

Graettinger has expertise focused on solving complex spatial and temporal related civil engineering problems using advanced geographic information system, GIS, technology. He and his research group develop desktop and online GIS applications that allow civil engineers to manage, understand and utilize crosscutting data. Correlating dissimilar data both vertically and horizontally within agencies, developing tools to accurately collect infrastructure characteristics and handling “Big Data” sets containing both time and space elements are a few recent areas of research.

Preventing loss as a result of extreme events is fundamental to engineering resilient communities. Understanding how infrastructure performs under these conditions requires a comprehensive and timely examination of post-event environments. Graettinger and his research group have been a part of several post-event reconnaissance teams, and have developed data collection and analysis techniques that allow for correlations to be made between infrastructure characteristics and observed performance.